How long can this charade go on? Republicans last week jumped for joy at the news of the terror plot in the UK.
"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.
Why? Because they think they are the party of national security. And the MSM seems plays right along - despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Let's look at the facts:
Just 5 months ago - and almost 5 years after terrorists breached airport security and hijacked four airplanes - an NBC news team was able to repeatedly smuggle explosive materials just like the 24 plotters are alleged to have plamnned to use. Watch the report.
Meanwhile, Bush has been quietly trying to cut funding for the development of the very kind of technology needed to detect explosives in airports.
This is an important issue since, 5 whole years after 911, we still only screen 7% of air cargo containers.
So compared to securing borders, ports and chemical facilities, where congressional oversight is spotty and politics frequently trumps security, aviation has seemed a model of terrorism prevention.
But is it? Since 2002, more than 100 media reports have documented security breaches involving knives, explosives and even handguns. In March, NBC News revealed that government investigators smuggled materials for homemade bombs through security at all 21 airports they tested--materials similar to those involved in the London plot. But nothing was done until last week, just as shoes were not removed at airport security until Richard Reid tried to explode a shoe bomb in 2002.
"We keep chasing yesterday's story," says Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia and author of a new book, "Americans at Risk." "The terrorists always seem one step ahead of us."
But the Bush Republican's Katrina-like management of our air security is the least of our problems. In a survey of top US security and foreign policy experts, 84 percent say the we are losing the war on terrorism.
One participant in the survey, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beach head at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey, the traditional land bridge linking the Middle East to Europe.
"The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror," said the former official, Michael Scheuer, the author of "Imperial Hubris," a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts. "It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential."
Republicans have failed to secure our airports, our ports, our nuclear power plants and chemical plants. And as we saw from Katrina, if a terrorist attack occurred, they would fail to respond to it.
This goes beyond mere incompetence. This is about a failed philosophy. Republicans cannot manage government because they believe, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "government is the problem."
Government is the problem when Republicans are in charge. And the exact same management skills we witnessed in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina are on display in every department of the Republican controlled government - including the Dept. of Homeland Security.
In fact, the only thing Republicans are good at is profiteering off of national security. So, now they want to claim that they have the mantle on securing our nation? Not this time.